


There Will Be No Atonement

by TheAstronomer



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Description of deaths, Discussion of Death, F/M, Historical References, No Fluff, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution, Reference to sexual violence, Sexual Content, Shellshock, Trauma, Vague Suicidal Ideation, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-25 03:51:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16653730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/pseuds/TheAstronomer
Summary: This is my first time writing Alfie Solomons. This is a younger, World War I Officer Alfie. He's shell-shocked and brutalised by what he's seen and done and he's in a brothel. Warning: there is a quite graphic discussion of war, trauma, shellshock/PTSD and then eventual smut. NSFW.This fic was also written in acknowledgement of the Centenary of the end of World War One, one of the most brutal conflicts in history.Thank you to Wysiwygot for being my cheerleader and reading about a million drafts in one day.





	There Will Be No Atonement

"Can you just ... hold me love, yeah?"

Alfie had never felt so tired, a deep chasm of exhaustion which almost split him in two.

He felt broken. He _knew_ he was broken and might never be able to put himself back together again. Not really. The feel of the woman’s arms around him were a dead weight. Like the bodies he had carried out of no-mans-land, heads lolling obscenely and a trail of steaming blood on the cold ground. He felt the tremor threaten to start again, squeezed his eyes shut and pulled her closer. He would hold it off. There was warmth and life there in her, even if it was exhausted and reluctant to exist at all. _Aren’t we fucking all, love?_ If he held her tight enough, maybe it would persuade him to keep living.

Historically, Alfie had never had issues with either wanting to be alive, or getting it up. They were intimately connected for him - life and fucking. Best mates you might say.

She heaved a deep sigh against him. "A lot of you boys just want to cuddle," she said, taking a drag of her cigarette. The movement of her arm pressed his face gently against her soft breast. But the purple bruises Alfie had spied on her thighs suggested not all of the lads just wanted a hug.

"That right?" he murmured. "We all just want our mums, do we?" He settled against her, even though his back was giving him jip as it had started to do these days. Probably the months spent hunched in cold, damp trenches.

Then she was crying. Sudden dry, gulping sobs, her face turned to the pillow. He patted her awkwardly with his big hands, shifting against her slight, shaking body. _What the fuck_? He had not had a woman cry on him for a long, long time.

"Come on now love, what’s this?" Alfie’s legs started their jittery dance on the mattress. His hearing was coming and going a bit too, like a wireless tuning itself in and out, static fuzz and whine. He had to focus. He could pull it back at this stage if he focussed.  _It's all in your head, mate. All in your fucking head._

"He was only eighteen. Eighteen!" She whipped round to face him on the bed and sat up, her face tight.

"Who’s that?" Alfie asked mildly. At this point, he was happy to listen to her so-very-common tale of woe if it meant he didn’t completely fall to fucking pieces in front of her.

"Samuel. Sammy! My Sammy!"

"Oh? Your sweetheart was he?"

"No he was me little brother! He got blown to smithereens at Passchendaele. It was all he ever wanted to do, join the army!"

She snapped her mouth shut and took a few more shuddering breaths. Alfie knew what she was thinking, what she wanted to know. _Did he suffer? Was he scared? Did he die quickly_?

What story did he feel like telling her?

"Let me tell you, when you go over the top, there’s nothing but adrenaline. Not fear. Brave lad was he? Yeah?" Alfie sat up and lit his own cigarette, blowing a plume of smoke across the tiny, claustrophobic room. He would leave her the rest of the fag packet as well as her fee.

She nodded, blinking away more bright tears.

 _Yeah, right_. There weren’t any brave lads. Not really. They were all either quietly shitting themselves or just berserk with fear and rage. Bravery didn’t really operate in a normal way at the Front. Alfie had just proven himself able to keep calm in intolerable circumstances. Natural leader. That’s why he had moved quickly to Officer and there were whispers of him going to Captain next. If he got over this little patch of “trouble” with his nerves. _Pull yourself together tout suite, Lieutenant Solomons and it's Captain Solomons we'll be calling you, young man._ Another step up on the rung of a ladder which still led to death, as far as Alfie saw it. He’d just have more stars on the insignia on his tunic when he popped his clogs. Plus they were running out of posh bastards to make into officers, that was the long and short of it. At least the war wasn’t as picky about the social class of who died the same way as everyday life in England was.  _Bullets, shells and gas are a great leveller of social class, funny that, innit?_

He was more equal here: still Jewish, still a rough-arse from Camden Town, but the lads knew that in his platoon they had the best possible chance of staying alive and that Alfie’s legendary silver tongue got them the best rations, extra chocolate, more fags or tobacco. Also the men under his command had the best feet, not a single case of trench foot among them. It was things like that which made a difference: those details. They might go home with a leg blown off, but the foot on the remaining leg would be fucking pristine.

The girl was still snivelling a bit. _Where was he? Yeah, Sammy_.

"Well then, I bet he fucking loved it. It gets to that, believe me. All that sitting around, fucking endless waiting for the order to go over the top. Only the smell of the bloke next to you farting. Or listening to fucking little Billy Prior and his shitty mouth organ playing the same sad tune a million times a day. We're fucking gagging for it, love. To get out there and fuck the Boche right up! You don’t feel nothing once you’re out there. You don't even see or hear nothing. ‘Cept maybe the sound of righteous trumpets, yeah, playing us a fucking tune. You’re just _there_.”

Maybe _she_ hadn't heard about the lad who was pulled out from under his mum’s stairs, shaking like a leaf, hardly able to walk, and then executed for desertion by a firing squad from his own regiment. But Alfie had. That took a fucking special kind of cruelty from the Powers That Be, getting your mates to shoot you dead. And they'd all fucking missed the shot too, or at least not hit him cleanly and he died in agony. _A cautionary tale, right? That’ll learn ya, mate_.

“It brings a ... _special_ kind of bravery out, yeah?” Alfie said grimly, turning away from the girls eager face, and tapping the ash from his cigarette out onto the bedside table.

The lies were pouring out of him now. They wouldn’t stop. She had stopped crying, was really listening. He had her full attention, maybe the first time anyone had had her full attention for a long time, in this miserable whorehouse, in this miserable fucking country which sent people to die like cattle. Here was the truth. Alfie didn’t care about fighting for “his” country, what the fuck did that mean anyway; or the honour, or which old posh bastard said which patch of miserable, muddy French countryside they had to advance to next. Alfie cared about staying alive. _Or he did_. And here was another truth: Alfie had started to enjoy the killing. He was getting creative about it. It was a break from the fucking mind-numbing boredom of life in the Trenches and it had been a long, long time since Alfie had observed Yom Kippur. He’d seen and survived more periods of combat than most, more than he should have because they kept sending him in. He couldn’t begin to fathom why he was still alive when countless, _endless,_ others were nothing more than bones and slime in the mud. Including little Sammy. _Oh, a sea of yarzheit candles, snuffed out alright, sweetie._

“So when he died, it was an honourable death, yeah? A soldiers death. And maybe he don’t have no grave or no gravestone for you to visit, but he don’t need one, he’s here, right?” A hand pressed to his heart. Or where his heart would be.

She was nodding eagerly, daft cow. He hated himself a bit, for this. But he was enjoying it too. That manipulation. _Truth pricks eyes_ , his mum used to say and this girl's eyes had already been pricked once too often. Only Alfie Solomons could persuade some poor bitch her brother _enjoyed_ dying.

It was still, even now, what they all wanted to hear. _Fucking civilians, not a single clue between them about what it was_ really  _like._ An honourable, brave death; the great lie and not only that but a collective lie that everyone in dear old Blighty told themselves. They probably did it in Germany too. _Oh yes, Fritz died quickly and cleanly, Frau Schmidt. Not squirming in agony with his bottom half blown off and his guts decorating a twenty yard radius around him. Or by mad Alfie Solomons hammering a nail into his brain with a duckboard, via his right nostril_.

Alfie had held a boy at Passchendaele as he died slowly of blood loss from a shrapnel wound, while they waited for stretcher-bearers who never arrived; a young boy who had chatted to Alfie, quite friendly, like, throughout. Insisting he was _alright, sir, I’ll be fine after a rest_. Gradually getting paler and more tired, leaning against Alfie, and talking about his mum, his big sister, his dog, the house he grew up in, how he wanted to be a joiner after the war, how his dad had an apprenticeship lined up for him - he’d whittled his mum a little dog out of a piece of wood - could he send it home? Could he? On and on until Alfie wanted to scream _shut up, shut the fuck up_! He stopped talking eventually of course, just faded away meekly. He was light as a feather really, leaning there, dead, against Alfie. _Was blood heavy,_ Alfie had thought absently. He felt nothing, couldn’t afford to.

“What’s your name love?”

“Lillian. Lily if you like.”

“Lily of the valley, is it? Lily from out of the thorns, eh? We’re both in the shit here aren’t we?”

He studied her face closely. Pretty enough, not exactly _shaymer_ , and also shut down, suspicious even. She thought he was taking the piss and maybe he was. She was a skinny little thing, shivering in her skimpy petticoat. How did they both end up here? Brutalised in more than one way. Both of them fucked by their own country.

Alfie had no recollection of how he got from France to the hospital back in England. It was a fog which had carried him there it seemed. D Block in The Royal Victoria hospital in Hampshire, to be exact; for soldiers who’d lost the plot, like him. Alfie was one of three Officers there but the other two... One of them was mute and staring, his face a terrible rictus of terror, sometimes he screamed and flinched from the slightest noise. The other, paralysed below the waist but with no actual physical injury, withdrawn and silent in his room. Alfie saw them wheeling in the machine that issued electric shocks to his legs, in an effort to get the poor bastard up. But Alfie steered clear, didn't even know their names, didn’t ask. He was mild in comparison, a bit shaky, went deaf every so often. And sometimes, a sort of ... absence from himself. Lost hours. The doctor said, psychosis. Again, no physical reason. _All in your mind, Alfie mate_.

 _Fucking malingerers, all of them, weren't they_? But they needed him back in action; it might be a hospital but Alfie was under no illusions, he was under military control in there. He toed the line: spoke to the doctors like a good lad, eventually went and saw the Jewish chaplain, helped him build a sukkah, from some filthy old canvas tents slung over a wonky frame. Alfie even went and found some branches in the grounds of the hospital and threw them on to create a makeshift roof. Then the only three Jews in the whole hospital: Alfie, the chaplain, and a 20 year old called Abrahams who had half his face missing, squatted there in that depressing cave on the first day of _Sukkot_ in a grim parody of the joyous feasting and resting it should have been. At least the food was kosher even if it was shit. Alfie knew he was a bad Jew. He'd rather focus on being alive than observant. Another thing Alfie knew was that if he got out of this shitstorm of a war alive, no fucker walking on this earth would ever have control over him again. _Categorical_.

There were nurses in the hospital of course, some of them quite pretty, but Alfie hadn't been able to get a hard-on for weeks. Not since he was back in France. Nothing like imminent death to get the blood flowing to his cock. He’d frequented French brothels often, as nearly all the men did. The army even set some up. On some days, before a big push on the Front or if there were rumours of a bombardment coming, the queue outside those shacks stretched for half a mile. Alfie spotted other Jewish men there sometimes, but since they were hardly in a position to have a discussion about the concept of _yetzer hara_ , they shiftily avoided each other’s eyes.

It was during his last week at the hospital, before he went back to France, and his future as Captain Solomons, that he ended up at this particular whorehouse in London, with Lily. And here he was, lying on her bed, where endless other men, a lot of them probably now mouldering in stinking mud in various other countries, had spunked their load, in desperation that they may never get their dicks inside a warm woman ever again. Some of them didn't, of course. Alfie knew he was not special in that he was in exactly the same position.

“I think you’re right about Sammy, mister,” Lily was saying.

A little smile had appeared, tremulous and faint and she had relaxed back down next to him, her small hand coasted gently down his chest to land on the front of his trousers, rubbing slightly at his crotch. _Oho! The game was still on and wasn't that what he was fucking here for after all?_

“I think he died doing what –“

Alfie launched himself at her, his thick lips crushed onto hers, before she could say it, before she perpetuated the Great Lie he never wanted to hear again, at least not in this room, and not now. What he wanted was to be like any other punter, whose cock was stiffening up nicely as her fingers closed around it over the thick khaki material of his uniform.

“What’s your name? Tell me your name?” she panted when he drew back to strip off her petticoat. Her breasts were surprisingly large; unexpected, despite the scant covering the flimsy garment had provided. Heavy and full, with sumptuous dark nipples which he palmed greedily. Strange contrast with the rest of her; narrow hips, bony shoulders and pale freckled skin.

“Alfie,” he grunted, stopping to pull his own clothes off with no preamble. Her saw her eyes alighting on his semi-erect cock. “Alfie Solomons. You’ll remember that name, yeah?”

“Circumcised!” Lily squawked suddenly, her surprise evident.

He couldn’t help chuckling but he made sure to catch her eye, properly checking her reaction.

“Bit of a pre-requisite for males of the Jewish faith, love. It ain’t an issue is it?”

His brows lowered and he felt himself tensing. He’d had problems with this before.

“No. No, course not... I just didn’t think you were Jewish,” she stuttered as he ran his hand over his cock which was lengthening and hardening further.

“We ain’t got horns, have we? Cloven hooves?”

She was looking uncomfortable now, maybe sensing the anger which was always just under the surface with Alfie.

“No, well... maybe I’m just used to seeing the more Orthodox folks around the East End?” she offered.

“Well, Lily, you must know that I _am_ Orthodox, love. That I am, in normal circumstances. Things are a bit... upside down at the moment, ain't they?”

He cleared his throat and winked at her. He could see the relief course through her, a visible deflation, unlike his old man, which was hard as iron now.

“You ain't had Jewish dick before then, Lily of the Valley? I might have to go a bit hard on you, love, on account of being cut, so I get a bit more feeling in it. That alright? I’ll try not to hurt you.”

“You wouldn't,” she said, expression unreadable.

He pushed her back onto the bed and kneeled between her legs, holding open her thighs with palms on either side. A steady, quite heavy pressure which had her spread wide open in front of him, but she didn’t balk at it. She was quiet, looking up at him and waiting.

“I’m just gonna... look at you, for a minute.”

And that’s what Alfie Solomons did. Looked at her. Intensely. Committing details to memory, perhaps the last time he'd be able to look at a woman at such an intimate level. The curve of her breasts where they rested against her ribs, the twitch of the long muscles in her legs, the dark thatch of hair between her legs, the pink glisten of her hole; here, he slid a finger in and she gave a little moan. More to see: her paper thin skin, a vein that pulsed on her temple, the orange flecks near the pupils of her hazel eyes, the rough looking texture of her dark hair. _All fucking glorious._

When Alfie finally slid himself into her, quite slow and gentle for him, despite his warning, she was warm and alive, panting against his chest so he shoved into her a bit harder. _Fuck, she was delicious_. She held his gaze too, unfalteringly, and it felt to Alfie that they were the only two people in the poxy world at that moment.

“I’ve been thinking,” Lily announced suddenly and breathlessly. “I’m going to leave here, maybe sign up at one of the munitions factories?”

“Ah ... Concentrate Lily, yeah? I’m ... busy here.”

But he couldn’t help a gruff laugh. Here he was having some kind of transcendental experience but she was thinking of her next job. He’d have to sort that out. _Fucking ridiculous_.

“I can sew though, maybe a parachute factory... oh!”

Alfie ground his hips against hers, an angry push up against her pubic bone. This had the desired effect and she twisted her hand in the hair at the nape of his neck. He pulled her legs up round his waist.

“Just... shut your trap, love, alright?” he grumbled. “But yeah, you do that. Good luck to you.”

Now it _was_ time to go hard at her, grinding himself against her, deep up inside her, her head hitting rhythmically against the headboard he was clutching to steady himself and to get some real power behind his thrusts. This was a real fucking, hard and dirty and wet, both of their grunts harsh and Alfie's head gloriously empty of coherent thought as her hands clutched his arse. 

Then her soft little stomach felt beautiful squashed under his when he lowered himself down to bury his head in her neck. Now he reduced his movements, closing her thighs around his cock so he had to slide it between them, nudging shallowly up into her cunt. He enjoyed this sensation of extra pressure for a while, more effort to get his cock in there and her little mewling sighs as he pulled himself slowly in and out of her. Her hands scrabbled at his back and he felt teeth graze his shoulder. Finally, he flipped her over and pulled her up onto all fours - buried himself up to the hilt from behind, the heavy mass of her tits in his hands, thumbs rolling over those beautiful nipples as he slammed his hips against her arse. His balls had started to tighten almost as soon as he began moving in her. Now there was no war, no Front, no return to France, only this moment when he was fucking his way out of his own broken head. The strangled cry he gave when he came violently into her was as quiet as he could manage.

 _La petite mort_ the French whores would say, and giggle. _Yeah very funny._ Had little Lily-flower come? He didn’t usually bother but he could see she was flushed and panting, her hand between her own legs, thighs shaking.  _Good lass._

* * *

 

“Shall I send you a postcard from France? ‘Weather’s Lovely, Wish You Were Here?’”

Alfie was fully dressed now, and had just pulled his cap on. The cigarettes were next to the money on the bedside table.

“No offence, Alfie, but I don’t want to go to France just yet. I’ll be here when you get back. Unless I get that other work. Maybe you can come and find me.”

He stood in the doorway, looking down at her. She was sleepy now, curled up on her side. He didn’t look at her face properly because he didn’t want to see any hope there. Besides, he already had her face, up there, in his head. He wouldn’t forget it.

“Yeah, love, maybe I will.”

This was a lie they _both_ wanted to believe this time. There would be no atonement for the other lies, the other acts which Alfie had committed in the name of King and Country. It was a dark fall. Alfie bounded down the stairs two at a time and out into the night.

**Author's Note:**

> The story of the soldier executed by his own regiment for desertion when he was mentally ill with PTSD/shell shock is completely true.
> 
> Canon had it that Alfie killed an Italian with the nail, duckboard etc method but in WW1 the Italians were on the same side as the British so not sure what that was about. Mistake by Stephen Knight or just one of Tom Hardy's wonderful ad libs? Anyway I changed it to a German because I'm a boring old stickler for details ha!


End file.
